Living with Landmines: From International Treaty to Reality

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom and The History of Fort St. Joseph, and the co-author of
Invisible and Inaudible in Washington: American

Black Rose Press deserves praise for publishing this book. The author,
along with Bruce Cockburn, who has written a formidable foreword, has
described the horrors of landmines, which can kill and maim 50 years
after being laid. Mozambique and Cambodia are the centres of attention,
the lands where the authors describe the lifestyle after innocent people
have stepped into the wrong place and lost a limb. Cockburn mentions
that a dealer in Russia, Italy, China, or the United States can
manufacture such lethal devices and sell them for five dollars. Bill
Purves, an engineer who explains the intricacies of landmines, says that
it costs between $200 and $1000 U.S. to clear a single landmine; a 1994
United Nations estimate indicated that if nobody ever laid another
landmine, the time needed to remove existing ones would be 1100 years at
a cost of $33 billion. In describing the horrors of landmines, the
politics of Southern Africa, and Cambodian value, this book is
excellent.

It is unfortunate, however, that nobody wrote a section on progress to
date in dealing with the problem. There is no mention of Princess Diana,
who used her high profile to campaign against landmines. There is no
mention of Lloyd Axworthy, until 2000 Foreign Minister of Canada, who
promoted the anti-landmines treaty signed in Ottawa in 1997 by
representatives of 133 nations. The Treaty of Ottawa committed
signatories to outlaw the use of landmines by March 2001. Nor is there
any mention of the refusals of the Clinton and Bush administrations to
sign the Treaty of Ottawa on the grounds that America needs landmines
for the defence of South Korea. There is no suggestion that the
well-fed, well-equipped, well-trained south Korean Army, assisted by
37,000 American service personnel and two coast-to-coast anti-tank walls
between Seoul and the inter-Korean border, might or might not prove
sufficient for the task.

Purves’s book is fine as far as it goes. Perhaps Black Rose should
provide a sequel.